It was a car accident on Highway 59, the same road that Darren had loved his whole life. Duke had run down to San Jacinto County to help with the cotton harvest on their father’s land. Granddaddy had been short of hands that fall of 1973. Clayton had come in from his teaching duties at UT Austin in the legal department; even William had taken a few days off work as a young state trooper at the time. All three brothers worked side by side as they had all through their childhood, calling out to each other across rows, teasing Clayton about his notoriously slow speed. Boy could count more scratches on his hands than bolls in his bag. Despite the drama among the siblings, the strife about the war, the brothers knew by then that Duke had a child coming, and there was a moment of real peace among the brothers. It was all love. It was on the drive back up to Nacogdoches after, back to his girl, that he’d been hit by a truck and spun off the road. He died there at the scene. Bell, Clayton said, had been the one to identify his body. And again, age and a heart condition had made Clayton wiser to what that might have done to a young pregnant girl newly alone.
“Yeah, I wasn’t but sixteen,” his mother said two days later, as she sat on the porch of the house on Lanana Street, where Darren had come to say… well, thank you hadn’t sounded right, since her actions on the witness stand were to undo what she had set in motion in the first place. But to say something more complicated. That she was his mother, and he didn’t always understand her, but today he understood her better than he ever had. The drinking came on after Duke’s death, she said, after she felt everything she ever wanted ripped away from her. And it made her mean and spiteful. To him, she told the full truth: She had given the gun over to DA Vaughn with the intent to get back at Darren, for what exactly, she didn’t even know. “I was bitter and drunk.”
“I know.”
“Ain’t an excuse.”
“I know.”
“But I’m sorry, son,” Bell said. “For all of it. I should have been there for you.”
“I had a good life,” he told her.
This time, she said, “I know.”
It was a final acknowledgment that she was in no position to raise him, drunk and angry and scratched all to hell inside by grief that clawed at her day and night.
“You want a coffee, a Coke, Dr Pepper or something before we go?”
They had been having this conversation looking out on Lanana from the porch, feet up on cardboard boxes. Bell and Pete had, painstakingly, only three good arms between them, packed up the house. They were moving to, of all places, Thornhill.
“My number come in,” Bell had said to him.
He’d warned her off their scheme, and more specifically about all the reasons the powers that be over there had to retaliate against anyone related to Darren Mathews. He told her that she wouldn’t make any real money, might even come out upside down.
“Money ain’t something folks like me and Pete see coming our way in this lifetime. We just trying to get by. Both of us getting on in years, and here’s a place providing health care that we can’t afford no other way. We’ll be in debt, maybe, but we’ll be alive. Ain’t a whole lot this country got going for people like us, son.”
No matter what he said, she couldn’t be moved off it.
She wanted what she couldn’t get anywhere else. Security.
“It’s not the paradise you think it is.”
Bell nodded and said she didn’t care about carrying debt into the afterlife, didn’t imagine God would greet her with a ledger on the other side. She would check all her and Pete’s meds, she swore. Darren wondered if they could all pay into a family plan together, words tumbling out of his mouth before he’d thought any of this through.
“Let me help you,” he said. “I don’t have much, but —”
He stopped short of inviting her to live at the farmhouse, her and Pete. He would have to discuss it with Randie first. But Bell waved off the thought of any help from her only child. She didn’t want charity, she said, and Darren felt a thick sorrow for all the ways she too was gripped by the idea that there was something noble in not needing help in this world, that self-reliance was an American virtue to be treasured. When we all needed each other more than ever, Darren thought, would only make it through whatever was coming next if we knew enough to lean on each other, lend loving hands.
But Bell insisted she was good. “I can take care of myself.”
They hugged when they parted ways and made jokes that there would be no Thanksgivings at Thornhill. The thought of a holiday season with his mother made him nervous, a little. A lot did about the year ahead: 2020. His free-floating anxiety had returned of late, waking him up in the middle of the night, each breath a sharp stab of desperation. He couldn’t get enough air in his lungs to calm his nervous system.
But he had Randie. He had a hand to hold.
He gave his uncle Pete a hug on his good side, and then he got in his Chevy and headed south, home to his soon-to-be wife. They had set a date for next month, something quiet, just the two of them on the back porch of the farmhouse in Camilla. It was her favorite place on the property, and they’d spent many mornings and nights out there, depending on the weather, the mercy of the Texas sun. They had an early dinner on the back porch tonight. Randie had grilled some fish. She thought the cuisine of East Texas would kill them both if they didn’t mix it up with some lighter fare. Darren prepared the salad. And they carried their plates outside, plus two mason jars filled with a tea she’d made with cloved oranges. The sun was starting to set, and the light was a holy gold, the breeze tinkling the wind chimes in a way that brought to mind church bells and angels. It was cool, mid-February now, and they’d brought out his grandmother’s quilts to lay over their laps. After a few bites, Randie said, “So, you going to go back to work?” There was no judgment in her voice, no nudging in one direction or another based on her opinion, which she had yet to voice to him.
Darren shrugged. “Maybe I’ll go back to law school.”
He’d been thinking about this a lot since learning about Thornhill. The kind of crimes for which a badge and a gun weren’t the answer. Crimes that happened in state legislatures, crimes of Congress, the laws that needed to be probed and put to the test in courtrooms daily. Would that reignite his hope that the country could reach for its best impulses again? If his gun wasn’t the answer, maybe the law was, the Constitution, old as dirt, but, like the blood and sweat–soaked land of his ancestors, the red dirt of East Texas, still capable of bearing fruit. “Either way, I have to tell you something,” he said.
He finally confessed it to Randie, to the wind, to the soul of his imperfect uncle.
He’d framed Bill King for the murder of Ronnie Malvo.
“I know,” Randie said.
“You know?”
“Yes.”
The nights he’d been blackout drunk and said things to her on the phone — he’d told her then. It had been his shame and self-hatred about it that scared her, not the fact of what he’d done. She still saw Darren as a hero, her hero, a man who could right big wrongs. And she didn’t care how he did it. The crimes against black folks, against her late husband, justified the means. She supported his decision to turn in his badge, if that’s what he wanted. But she had never once thought it necessary. “This life is yours, to decide how you want to add your piece to our time here.” And either way it wasn’t anything that he had to decide tonight. No, he didn’t suppose he did. Right now, there was a setting sun. There was the wintergreen grass, the air wet as always, but soft this evening like a kiss. There was his garden to get into tomorrow, a call to check in on Rey, who was working at a tire-manufacturing plant in Dallas and going to community college. And he would reach out to Greg about Thornhill again and what could be done to hold them accountable. Because there was no doubt that there would be service in his life; it was in his blood. Be it boots on the ground as a Ranger or boots in a courtroom, his uncle William’s words still held true.
The nobility is in the fight.
Acknowledgments
I want to first and foremost acknowledge the grace I have been given in this lifetime by being born into a family of dynamic, creative, hardworking, wily, confident, visionary, sweet, and sensitive black Texans going back over five generations. It has been the blessing of my life to know the pure heart of Texas at its best. Its spirit of open arms, of fellowship and protection — love — values that even its worst charlatans in power cannot undo. I’d like to take this moment to honor two of my relatives in particular.
In 2023, we lost my “aunt” Lennette Benjamin, who was my mother’s “sister cousin” and one of the funniest women I ever met. She was an absolute hoot, who also happened to be one of the foremost sickle cell physicians in the world. She dedicated her career to pain management for patients struck by the disease, and she improved the lives of thousands of people with her medical acumen, with her humor, her straight talk, and her deep love and caring for her patients. As a kid, I thought Lennette was the coolest. As a woman, I am in awe of what she gave the world.
In 2022, we lost my darling Precious, née Willie Jean Perry, aka Willie Jean Birmingham. She was my grandmother and one of the great loves of my life. She carried herself with warmth and wisdom, was full of front-porch philosophizing that kept her heart and soul safe in ninety-three years of living in rural East Texas. “Things ain’t so bad they couldn’t be worse” was a favorite saying of hers and a reminder that even in the worst of times, goodness can be found. Precious was the East Texas sun, the sweetness of a Southern peach, the beauty in the flight of the eagle that nests in Coldspring in San Jacinto County. I was blessed that she was my grandmother.
I would like to thank Josh Kendall at Mulholland Books and Rebecca Gray and Miranda Jewess at Viper Books in the UK for their counsel and their confidence in me. Thanks as ever to Richard Abate, who helped bring Darren Mathews into this world, along with Reagan Arthur. Thanks also to Dr. Cheryl Arutt for helping me psychologically weather some of the most difficult times in history and for always helping me be brave.
My forever thanks to Karl Fenske for always holding my hand. And my eternal love, awe, and respect for my Clara. Mothering you is the best thing I’ve ever done.
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